Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
The Neural Archive is a repository of publications collected by us during the years. Browse our collection here.
Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.
The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.
Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.
YesNo by Timo Kahlen feels like “traditional” net art, a well crafted stuck webpage for the user’s aural and clickable enjoyment.
The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”
Harsh Noise Wally, is a sophisticated mashup mixing strips of Wally, the lazy and cynic colleague of Dilbert with some epic noise music extreme attitudes. Well conceived and assembled.
Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400
GoPro ancestors in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly sport and movie persons like F1 driver Jackie Stewart, Bob Sinclair and Steve McQueen.
“Artificial” is a term whose meaning has evolved from defining non-natural things, to distinguishing things so close to nature that confusion ensues. This is leading to frequent cultural confrontations between humans and machines, as “Computers Watching Movies” by Benjamin Grosser →
CD – Consumer Waste
Playfulness with spatiality is immediately evident in these three recordings (around 29 minutes in total) that were captured and performed in multiple locations in a nature reserve on Kapiti Island, New Zealand. The area is famous →
Autonomedia, ISBN: 978-1570272646, English, 256 pages, 2013, USA
As a provocative but systemic reaction to the constraints of the economic crisis, cultural activists have conceived a number of their own counter-acts, which have materialised in theories, artworks, actions and productions. →
CD – 845 Audio
These three newly created tracks by Canadians Tim Olive (who runs the 845 label) and Anne-F Jacques feel homogenous in their inspiration and quality of sound. The sounds forming the record were amplified and manipulated by →
As with many of our consumer technologies, the historical trajectory of sound recording has been one of progressive banalisation. If the first people to listen to recorded music in the late 19th century thought they were experiencing a form of →
CD – Hubro
Norwegian Frode Haltli is a very sensitive accordionist whose excellent technique has been repeatedly witnessed in a series of works undertaken at the most diverse geographic and stylistic latitudes. In this fourth release for Hubro, the musician →
Print has intrinsic archival qualities, being, as with other static media, a portrait of content frozen in space and time. E-publishing is exactly the opposite: its ephemeral digital structure (which has to be interpreted and executed by a machine every →
CD – Dragons Eye
This album opens with iterated patterns that unravel with extreme precision. Appealing multiform textures and subtle crackling audio emergencies accelerate, slow down and reassemble at will in a cascading catalogue of new sequences. The skillful articulations →
Japanese obscenity laws are quite strict, especially concerning the representation of genitalia, in an apparently striking contradiction with the vast variety of underage porn that is somehow allowed. “3D MK Boat” is a conceptual work by the Japanese artist Megumi →
CD – Baskaru
In the enclaves of international electronic music Frans De Waard is well-known and respected as a reviewer of experimental music and as a talented composer. Previously he has worked with the Kapotte Muziek ensemble, as well as →
Ashgate Pub Co, ISBN: 978-1409441564, English, 277 pages, 2013, UK
This is a rigorous study of sound art in Australia, a product of twenty years of research that contextualises key historical events and theories in the various branches of experimental →
CD – Aposiopèse
Yvan Etienne is active as a sound experimenter interested in issues surrounding site-specific audio installations and as a composer proposing weighty reflections on perception and the physicality of sounds in space. Etienne has not been lacking for →
As Europe’s industrial districts are gradually replaced by office blocks with curtain walls, sites once filled by the clamor of machines are turned into glossy and silent images for architecture magazines. In the window of time between closure and demolition →
CD – FFSpace
Body in White, the latest release from 14Circles, immediately stands out from our pile of new tracks to be reviewed thanks to its fancy packaging: the half plexiglass, half hardbound CD features striking artwork by V4W.ENKO. Hiding →
